Rewilding… for our own sake

Heatwaves this Summer came and went. Mercury reached well over 40°C on several occasion.

I know there will be more of them in the future as our climate progresses to unpredictable instability.

Meanwhile, we buy another aircon, we sip slushies and we tweet about how hot it is. Who are we kidding?

As we put more demands on our coal-fired power plants with extra electric appliances, we are leading us to blackouts.

As we drive our air-conditioned car and hit the air-conditioned mall, we teach our bodies to not cope with the heat.

“This is intrinsically unsustainable. This is removing us the adaptability capacity of our species.”

In any ecosystem, plants and animals adapt to changes. But for us humans, we think we know better, we make our ecosystems adapt to our needs (well, our wants, really).

We are many who woke up to the reality of this ludicrous human pattern. We are choosing to rewild. We live a simpler life, attuned to our ecosystem, decluttered from products and gadgets. We grow food. We connect face to face with people. We drive with our windows down. We play in the woods.

We’re not all tree huggers. We don’t all grow dreadlocks. We talk, not grunt.

Through the back fence, into the wild

Taking shelter in our rainforest

45°C!!!

We don’t need an air-conditioned house – instead we strip to our bare essentials and lay low until the heatwave passes. We go to the beach and not the shopping mall. And best of all, we take shelter in a hammock deep inside the forest (that is for the wildest of rewilders!).

Rewilding makes us live simply and exercise our adaptability. So when the elements unleash their upset onto us, it is, for us, business as usual. We are fit in our bodies, in our mind, we know life’s skills, and learn ancestral skills and we connect with Nature for everything, including entertainment.